Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
first released 1st April 2022

"Oh, I can't believe it!" Stuart spun in starry-eyed wonder, taking in the faux-Earth interior of the Mothership. "Me in an alliance with, in the presence of, Princess Aja and Prince Krel of House Tarron! And the renowned Varvatos Vex, of course," he said, with a bow in that gentleman's direction. "I am /standing/ in the Mothership of the royal family!" His hands were clenched and he seemed to be almost vibrating in glee. "Oh, this is just too much!"

Mother's hologram circled Stuart. "My royals," she said, "are you sure about the presence of this Durian?"

"Absolutely sure," Krel told her.

"Stuart is a valuable ally," Aja said.

Varvatos, meanwhile, crossed his arms and looked down at the disguised Durian. "Stuart has proven his worth in the past and Varvatos has no doubts he shall again."

Stuart blinked up at him. "Pardon? I mean, I don't believe I've ever been of help to anyone before. And I would certainly remember meeting a being of your rather impressive reputation..."

"You do not remember it," Varvatos informed him, "because it has not yet happened."

Stuart stood there blinking dumbly for a minute. Then, "Are you talking about time travel?" he asked. "Because I've heard of it, certainly, who hasn't? But it's all strictly theoretical. No matter how well you Akiridions are able to warp the laws of space and time, time travel itself remains a pipe dream. An impossibility!"

"Impossible for science, maybe," said Krel, leaning against the sofa. "Not for magic."

Stuart stared. "No..." There was incredulity and dawning delight in his expression. "You mean there's magic here on Earth? Real magic, not just the sleight of hand Penn and Teller stuff?"

"Oh yes," Aja told him. "And you will meet our friends who have it soon enough."

"More time travelers?" Stuart's face was lit up now. He practically danced. "Ooh, I can't wait!"

"For now, however, we must show you our circumstances and ask for your discretion," Varvatos told him. "Mother, Stuart is to be allowed full access."

"As you command, Commander Vex."

"Wait, I get to see the whole ship?" Stuart's eyes were wide. "Oh, this /is/ an honor. Lead the way, Commander Vex!" He threw a salute, and followed Varvatos to the fireplace and within.


The best part of the day was the early morning. Eli had his paper route, so he completely had a reason to leave the house before his mom even got up, and go see what was going on in Arcadia Oaks. Sometimes he even lucked out and was able to get snapshots of creepers or suspected supernatural or alien activity! The air was fresh and clean, there were practically no cars trying to run bicyclists off the road, and, if he was fast with his route, he had almost an entire hour to himself before school.

Today, Eli had a plan for that hour. He'd gotten a good look at the Trollmarket library yesterday. It had been huge, which he supposed only made sense; trolls were huge, their library would also be huge! There had been tons of books, holding all kind of esoteric and supernatural information, and he wanted to read them all. Only one obstacle stood in his way.

Eli skidded his bike down the side of the canal and raced to the bridge, where Jim had shown them all the entrance to Trollmarket. Knocking down the kickstand of his bike, he dismounted and reached into his backpack, pulling out his very. own. horngazel. He held it before himself, feeling like it was the holy grail. Because today - today was the day he, Elijah Leslie Pepperjack, was going to start unlocking the secrets of the universe.

He carved the entrance to Trollmarket and pressed his hand to the concrete, watching as magic fractured it away. He wheeled his bike inside for safe-keeping, and set off down the stairs, his goal in mind.

Today was the day to learn something.


"Uh, Mister Blinky?"

Blinky jumped, the book in his hands flying into the air. He scrambled to catch it before it landed, and barely succeeded. Carefully he placed it down on the table. Then, and only then, did he turn to see his young visitor.

"Greetings, young Eli," he said, trying not to hold his own startlement against the boy. It surely hadn't been Eli's intention, and it was no fault of his that Blinky had been absorbed in his reading. "Should you not be on your way to school?"

The boy shrugged, fiddling with one of the straps to his backpack as he stepped fully into Blinky's library. "I have about fifty minutes before I need to go."

"Well, then, how may I be of assistance?"

"Um. I know you have all these books, and Jim and everyone can read them, but I can't, so... I was wondering if you could teach me to read Trollish? Or if you maybe had a dictionary or primer I could borrow?"

Blinky stood still, amazed. In hindsight, it had always been inevitable that Jim, Tobias, and Claire would all learn to read Trollish, as entwined as they were with Trollmarket. Douxie, of course, had known Trollish since at least Blinky's first glancing encounter with him, nine hundred years ago in Dwoza. But for one of their fully human, non-magically-inclined allies to wish to learn Blinky's own natal language...?

"My boy," said Blinky quietly, "I would be overjoyed to be your teacher in this endeavor. Fifty minutes, you said?" A nod. "That is quite enough time to give us a start." He began to stack books aside, clearing space on the table. Eli started helping; while he did that, Blinky fetched chalk and slate. "To begin with," he said, setting them on the table between the two of them, "Trollish is composed of twenty phonetic characters, unlike the twenty-six of your modern English. Let us begin with those."

Eli hurriedly whipped a notebook, its pages made of the delicate, flimsy paper that Blinky knew most of his brethren would destroy with a touch, and began copying each character into it as Blinky wrote them on the slate.

When they reached the end of the alphabet, Eli ran a finger down his list. "And this is only the first language, isn't it?" he asked, voice cracking in the way of youth everywhere.

Blinky nodded solemnly. "Most of my books are, of course, written in Trollish. But I also have volumes in modern Draconic, as well as some in Mermish, Fae cant, and a few in Sasquatch. I believe the arcane bookstore has more in a wider variety of tongues." He knew his longing was bleeding into his voice; Eli gave him a confused look. "I... have not yet been able to visit Douxie's place of employment," he confessed. "And I do so long to do so."

"Why not?" Eli asked, then his eyes widened and he nodded, answering his own question. "Oh, the store hours are all during daylight."

"Just so," agreed Blinky. "I must study and find the exchange rates for various metals and gems, so that I may make appropriate payment for my purchases, whenever the joyous event happens."

"Do... do you think Douxie would teach me the alphabets for those languages too?"

Blinky smiled and rested his hand on the child's back. "I am certain he would. Some wizards are jealous of their knowledge and hoard it like dragons. But Hisirdoux Casperan, from all that I have ever heard tell, is not one of those sorts. He understands that knowledge is to be shared and passed on. I am quite sure he will grant you instruction in those tongues he knows. Now, recite back to me the characters and their phonetic sounds."

As Eli leaned forward and began, stumblingly, to do so, Blinky smiled. It had been too long since he had had the charge of a young one, and been in the position of being simply a teacher, not a trainer.

He had missed it.


Douxie woke to the faint sound of the garage door opening and closing, followed by the hum of a Vespa's motor revving up, then fading off into the distance. Normally, given the muting spell he'd put on all the house's bedrooms, he wouldn't have even heard that much, but he'd left his window open the night before, causing a sound gap in the structure of the spell.

Jim was off to school, then, and Barbara probably still asleep after her night shift. As was Archie, curled on the pillow, arched around Douxie's head, black hair and black fur mingling, indistinguishable until the eye reached the blue tips of Douxie's hair.

Douxie eased out from under the sleeping dragon and sat up quietly, thinking. Jim was right. With the knowledge that the Arcane Order might be upon them at any time, the time for caution and playing by wizardkind's unwritten rules was out.

Time to save the world.

Time to out my people.

The thing about being a wizard was... if you did magic for long enough, at a high enough level, you became aware of how magic underpinned everything on the planet. It was subtle, nearly invisible, but it was there. If he fine-tuned his senses enough and looked and listened, Hisirdoux could feel it all. Rocks held magic, which the trolls used. Water held magic, hosting a whole plethora of species that science had yet to describe. Even the air itself held magic; though it was thicker in places of immense magical concentration, such as near standing stones, or heartstones, every human on the planet breathed in magic each day and let it sustain them... and then breathed it out.

But as much as the raw materials that made up life on Earth were magic... so was intention. A spell was a working, a wizard's taking the power that existed within themselves and all around them, channeling it, directing it, shaping the magic to their desired effect.

And magic didn't have to be a spell.

Life itself, and living it, was a working. Every day he existed, Douxie changed the world by being in it. And if he focused that, focused his intent...

This will be a magnum opus.

No other wizard, not a single one since the fall of Atlantis itself, had succeeded in making magic mainstream. It was, Douxie thought, a part of the Arcane Order's frustration with humanity. Humans didn't accept magic. They didn't wonder at it. Instead, like a child throwing a tantrum at something it could not have, they stamped it out, and, in recent centuries, had turned to science and reason and rationality, seeking replacements for the things they could not see, could not touch, could not wield.

Humans were like matches - they burned so brightly, but without magic sustaining them, their lives were so brief. They were alone among sentients in that regard, and no one had ever been able to tell Douxie why. It was a tragedy.

This is the biggest thing I will ever do.

And there was no way that he could guarantee that his effort to introduce magic, true magic, to a wider audience, would bear fruit. It might be all for nothing. It might get him, and rather a lot of other wizards and magic beings, killed.

We're all going to die anyway, if the Arcane Order dies again. Or if they get their way.

Douxie summoned a clean whiteboard out of his vambrace, and a dry-erase marker from the pocket of his hoodie. Uncapping it, he began to write, trying to organize his thoughts.

He needed Mary's social media expertise to make TikTok videos, and possibly put them up on YouTube. He'd need Toby in on this, too; The Adventures of DJ Kleb had been a strictly amateur work, composed largely of lucky footage and Krel's questionable acting skills, but the cuts and careful use of special effects had been clever and shown real promise.

He might need Jamie, the better of his coworkers at the bookshop, to help him source some interesting but old-fashioned spells to try from the stock of grimoires in the back room. Or maybe Archie could help with that.

"Arch," Douxie said to the sleeping dragon, "know any old spells that'd be hilarious to film?"

"Mmm, Halstine's Infernal Equation," Archie replied without opening his eyes. Douxie noted it down on the whiteboard. A few seconds later Archie's eyes flew open. "What do you need to film spells for?" he asked, sounding worried.

"Going for broke," Douxie told him. "If our best chance to save the world is to flip the Arcane Order to our side after all, then I need a game plan."

"I thought we were going back out to the ranch today," Archie said, stretching. He padded over, picked his glasses up off the bedside table, and sat down next to Douxie, looking over the writing.

"We are," Douxie told him. "I've got five more layers of armor to weave. But Jim's right. This is too important to leave to chance or fate. Forget him changing the world-I've got to change it, and fast."

"One could argue that he's changing the world by changing your approach to it," Archie said absently, golden gaze still skimming across Douxie's handwriting. "If you're going to do this, Doux, you know it means dropping all pretense of normality."

Douxie's fingers tightened momentarily on his marker. "I know," he said softly. "And I know this is risky, Arch, but..." He drew a breath. "We can't imprison the Arcane Order the way we did Morgana; there's simply nothing strong enough to hold them. Which leaves three options. One: we win the battle and kill the Order, triggering an apocalypse. Two: we lose the battle and they remake the world, causing an apocalypse."

"Or three, you subvert them and prevent the apocalypse," Archie concluded.

Douxie nodded. "It's the only way everything on the planet doesn't die."

"This is risky, Douxie." Archie looked up from the board, gold eyes meeting gold.

"If I pull this off, it'll be the greatest thing a wizard's done since Atlantis fell," Hisirdoux said. He stroked a hand down his familiar's spine. "And I'll do it all with apprentice's magic."

"You could die."

Douxie's lips narrowed to a line. "I don't want to die, Arch. I'll try not to. But some things..." He looked back at the whiteboard. "Some things are worth dying for."

Archie was silent for a long minute, then said, "Well, I suppose this means we can start using a broomstick again, instead of feeling every last pothole and road patch with that skateboard of yours."

Douxie felt a smile break out. Even if he was on the darkest of paths with this, at least his familiar had his back. "Thanks, Arch," he said, giving a hug. "Who knows, maybe we'll even survive."


"Barbara," a voice said softly, speaking in her dreams. "Barbara, I'm terribly sorry. But I need you to wake up."

She made a noise and swam muzzily upward toward consciousness, her dreams falling away, leaving her disoriented and just a touch dizzy. Blinking her way awake, she turned her head in her darkened bedroom to see a blurry black-haired shape crouching by the side of her bed. "Douxie?" she croaked.

He handed her her glasses then, after she put them on, followed them with her glass of water. She drank gratefully-her mouth was always parched when she woke up-and tried to figure out what time it was. She finally resorted to glancing at the bedside table and realizing she'd gotten less than five hours' sleep. "Douxie, why are you waking me up?"

"I'm terribly sorry," her son repeated, "but I have to leave soon, to go work on armor, and this is kind of important. I've got no idea how to go about this, but you're a medical doctor, so." He was looking anywhere but at her, she realized. He was refusing to meet her eyes, like there was something going on he was ashamed of.

She set down her glass and sat fully up. "Douxie, what's wrong?"

He looked at her, bit his lip, looked away. Archie was nowhere in sight, she realized. "I've got..." A breath in and out, like he was trying to steady himself. "I've got anxiety," he said quietly. "Diagnosable. It's usually something I can manage. I have been managing it! But." Another breath. "It's gotten worse, and I know I should probably see a therapist or something, but there really aren't many qualified to deal with immortals' problems, and there isn't time-"

"Douxie." She cut off his rambling babble with a single word.

He looked up at her. "I think I need to go back on meds," he said. "And I don't know how to go about that."

Barbara blinked. "You were on medication before?"

Douxie nodded. "About twenty-five years ago."

"You stopped?"

"The side effects were worse than the panic attacks." Judging by his downturned mouth, it wasn't a happy memory. "Arch and I moved, and after my supply ran out... I just didn't look for more. Didn't find a new doctor."

Which led to a new, unhappy thought that hadn't occurred to her before. "Douxie, when was the last time you went to a doctor?"

"Uhhh." He blinked. "Twenty-five years ago?"

"Douxie!"

"What?" He held his hands up. "I'm immortal, Barbara! It's not like I need cancer screenings or, or tonsil checkups or anything!"

"What about vaccinations?" she shot back, horrified. And suddenly terrified at the thought of all the things he might be vulnerable to. "The chicken pox vaccine has come out since then! Not to mention things like annual flu shots. Or, god forbid, tetanus. We need to get you up to date."

Douxie's mouth opened then closed again. He looked sad, she thought. "Barbara... I don't get sick. Or infected."

"That's luck," she argued. "Douxie, luck could run out at any time, you could get really sick..."

He shook his head, and stood, then sat down next to her on her bed. "I'm immortal," he said softly, meeting her eyes. "And I know that's not something you run into much of, in your line of work, because... well, immortality doesn't simply mean never getting any older."

"What... what does it mean, then?" She suddenly felt stupid for never having thought to ask before.

Douxie gave her a wan smile. "It means I've got enough magic that it preserves my body exactly as it is. I don't get sick, I don't get older, any injuries heal clean and fast. About the only thing that could put me under the weather is expending more magic than I really should. And even that, I regenerate pretty fast."

She felt dumbfounded. "And this is something you're warning Jim against?"

Douxie shrugged. "Living forever, without ever getting sick, must sound like a dream, I suppose. Until you get a few centuries under your belt and realize why exactly it sucks."

She blinked.

Her son reached out and brushed her hair behind her ear. His hand lingered on her cheek, seeking connection. "The country of my birth is gone. No one left alive speaks my mother tongue. I know jokes that no one else would get. Culture dies, Barbara. And so does everyone you love." He smiled at her, sweet and oh so sad. "I'm older than your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother. I love you as my mother... and I know that I will see you buried. You and every friend I've made in Arcadia, unless they're foolish enough to also choose eternity. A hundred years from now, I will visit your grave, and miss you as fiercely as the day you died, because time can only ever blunt the edges of absence. It can never take away the ache of loneliness."

Oh, was all Barbara could think, open-mouthed, as she suddenly realized just a slice of Douxie's pain. Of the deep sadness that she'd caught a glimpse of, now and again, weighing him down.

He swallowed. "But that's not what I woke you to ask about," he said, before she could formulate any intelligent reply. "Head meds," he prompted her.

"Oh-okay," she stuttered, regathering her scattered thoughts. She took a breath, grounding herself. "You do know that even if we get you on the right one to start with, it'll take some time before it begins to kick in, right? And there's dosage adjustments, and, honestly, so many different-" she hesitated to use his term, because it was inaccurate and pejorative, but ultimately went with it for the sake of his comfort, "-'head meds' out there. The odds of getting the right one on the first try are pretty slim."

"I know." His smile was wan. "But I've got to do something. I can't... we can't afford for me to keep having panic attacks and depressive episodes. Not with the Arcane Order imminent."

Now her hand found his cheek. "Panic attacks?" Barbara asked. "Depression? Douxie..."

He shrugged. "Usually I work so much I'm too exhausted for it. Usually the stakes aren't this high."

She didn't know how to respond to that. She had been the one to tell him to cut down to a (slightly more than) forty hour work week. But it had been very much in response to his own desire. And she certainly couldn't do anything to minimize the stakes he and Jim and their friends were facing. It wasn't like she was able to save the world for them. But what she could do was...

"All right," she said. "I'll get you booked in to see a doctor, and we'll see what medication they think might be best for you."

"The money-"

"You let me worry about the money," she overrode him. "I'm the adult with a high-paying job, and you're my kid. You don't worry about the money, okay?"

Douxie nodded, then hesitated. "Will you tell Jim?" he asked in a very small voice.

"Not unless you want me to," Barbara said slowly. Wondering why he'd even brought it up.

"I should tell him," Douxie said, looking at the floor. "I know I should, he's my king as well as my brother, he needs to know my weakness-"

"It's not a weakness," Barbara argued.

Gold and emerald eyes blazed. "It is," Douxie insisted.

"It's not," she insisted back. "Neurodivergency is not a fatal flaw."

"Barbara." He stared straight into her eyes. "I'm an aromantic asexual with anxiety, which is wonderful for alliteration, but is absolutely terrible for the important things in my life, like being a master wizard, being a good brother and son, or, I don't know, saving the world. Who I am, what I am, is completely a liability. Everyone would be better off if I was like Merlin instead."

It took Barbara a moment to find her voice, she was so taken aback by Douxie's brutal self-loathing. "If that's true," she finally said, "why do your friends all agree that they want you, and will happily kill Merlin the next time he shows his face?"

Douxie had no answer for that.

She reached out and brushed his hair out of his eyes, letting her hand linger against his face. Her beautiful, traumatized older son. She only wished she'd been able to adopt him years before. "Having anxiety isn't a fatal flaw," she repeated quietly. "It's just one part of you. I've seen the way you take care of everyone around you. How caring your heart is. How creative and how determined you are. Look at the way you're asking for help when you need it. That's so strong, Douxie. And your friends and your family love you just as you are, even the parts that aren't perfect." Her thumb swept back and forth against his cheekbone. "Being a wizard isn't everything you are."

"But it is." There was unhappiness underlying his voice. "If I'm not a wizard, then..." His words trailed off. He shook his head. "Everything that's ever happened to me, good or bad, is because of my magic, Barbara. I can't just take the good and leave the bad, it doesn't work like that. It's all part of me, and it's all because I was born with too much magic."

Barbara sighed, and relented, knowing already this wasn't one she was going to win. "We'll get you an appointment, and see about getting you on some anxiety medication," she reiterated. "And when we find one that works for you, and you feel stabilized, we'll revisit this conversation then, okay?"

Douxie nodded. "All right," he agreed.